Posts Tagged ‘Dirty Harry’

For starters I’m a Clint Eastwood fanboy. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is my favorite movie ever. That said let’s get on with some opinions on Gran Torino, get ready to hear a lot of praise for this great movie.

The movie is about Walt Kowalski, you get one quess at who plays him, a bitter Korean war veteran, whose wife has died right before the movie begins. Kowalski bitches at everyone near him, especially his son’s family, who Kowalski sees as only trying to take use of him (which is exactly what they attempt). Then one day a family of “gooks” moves in next to him and Kowalski ends up bonding with the family and especially the son Thao. That’s the plot, now for the interesting parts.

Walt Kowalski as a character is in my opinion the man with no name and Dirty Harry as an old bitter man. Kowalski believes in taking justice into his own hands and so when a gang attacks the “gook” family, as Kowalski puts it, he rises to defend with his good old rifle from Korea and you get the one liner: “Get off my lawn”, which the trailer has in it as well. What the trailer forgot though, were the lines after that: “We used to stack fucks like you five feet high in Korea and use you for sandbags.” The movie is full off lines like these and a real party of one liners. A friend who happened to be at the movie theater at the same time called the movie a guy-movie and well, she’s got a point. But what a guy-movie it is!

So back to Walt Kowalski. He seems to be an ironised version of Clint’s earlier characters, mainly the ones I already mentioned. In Gran Torino though, acting like Dirty Harry or Blondie would, doesn’t pay off. Instead Kowalski chooses to deal with his problems differently. He doesn’t shoot people but instead aims at them with his finger. This is only one of the jokes Gran Torino cracks towards the Dollar trilogy and Dirty Harry. The movie is simply hilarous to a viewer who has seen both movies as jokes are thrown toward Clint’s characters in those films almost at a constant feed. Eastwood adds to his merits a knack at being a comedian. When a girl called Youa tells Kowalski that he is funny, he replies: “I’ve been called a lot of things, but never funny.”

Gran Torino shows that the vigilantism of Dirty Harry doesn’t pay off, because taking the law into your own hands has consequences that just brood more hatred. Kowalski realizes he isn’t alone in the world, but that defending his friends the violent way only ends up in those friends, he so hard tried to defend, getting seriously injured. The ending is brilliant and if this is to be Clint’s last movie as an actor he chose a badass way to end his acting career. If you have seen the Dollar trilogy and Dirty Harry, and have a sense of humor, you will laugh your ass off. But besides being one of the funniest films I’ve seen in a long time, Gran Torino also has a deeper level to it. A must see movie if you fill the description I gave, you’ll like it otherwise as well but many of the jokes won’t seem as funny.